Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

One late afternoon, a Friday, his tenth day at the lake, when he was returning in the canoe with some fresh unsatisfactory bittern footage, he heard car engines, loud music, and then motorcycles coming down the long driveway. By the time he got the canoe out of the water, Mitch and sexy Brenda and three other couples—three goon buddies of Mitch’s and three girls in sprayed-on bell-bottoms and halter tops—were unloading beer and camping gear and coolers onto the lawn behind the house. A diesel pickup was idling with a smoker’s cough, powering a sound system loaded with Aerosmith. One of the goon friends had a stud-collared Rottweiler on a towing-chain leash.

“Hey, nature boy,” Mitch said. “I hope you don’t mind some company.”

“Yeah, I do mind,” Walter said, blushing, in spite of himself, at how uncool he must have looked to the company. “I mind a lot. I’m here alone. You can’t be here.”

“Yes I can,” Mitch said. “In fact, it’s you that shouldn’t be here. You can stay tonight if you want, but I’m here now. You are on my property.”

“This is not your property.”

“I’m renting it now. You wanted me to pay rent, and this is what I’m renting.”

“What about your job?”

“I quit. I’m out of there.”

Walter, near tears, went into the house and hid the camera in a laundry basket. Then he rode his bicycle through a twilight suddenly drained of charm and filled with mosquitoes and hostility, and called home from the pay phone outside the Fen City Co-op. Yes, his mother confirmed, she and Mitch and his father had had angry words and decided that the best solution was to keep the house in the family and let Mitch do the repairs on it and learn to take more responsibility.

“Mom, it’s going to be party central. He’s going to burn the house down.”

“Well, I just feel more comfortable having you here and Mitch on his own,” she said. “You were right about that, sweetie. And now you can come home. We miss you, and you’re not really old enough to be by yourself all summer.”

“But I’m having a great time out here. I’m getting so much done.”

“I’m sorry about that, Walter. But this is what we’ve decided.”

Biking back to the house in near-darkness, he could hear the noise from half a mile away. Cock-rock guitar soloing, blunt drunken shouting, the dog baying, firecrackers, a motorcycle engine sputtering and screaming. Mitch and his friends had pitched tents and built a big fire and were attempting to flame-broil hamburgers in a cloud of pot smoke. They didn’t even look at Walter as he went inside. He locked himself in the bedroom and lay in bed and let himself be tortured by the noise. Why couldn’t they be quiet ? Why this need to sonically assault a world in which some people appreciated silence? The din went on and on and on. It produced a fever to which everyone else was apparently immune. A fever of self-pitying alienation. Which, as it raged in Walter that night, scarred him permanently with hatred of the bellowing vox populi, and also, curiously, with an aversion to the outdoor world. He’d come openhearted to nature, and nature, in its weakness, which was like his mother’s weakness, had let him down. Had allowed itself so easily to be overrun by noisy idiots. He loved nature, but only abstractly, and no more than he loved good novels or foreign movies, and less than he came to love Patty and his kids, and so, for the next twenty years, he made himself a city person. Even when he left 3M to do conservation work, his primary interest in working for the Conservancy, and later for the Trust, was to safeguard pockets of nature from loutish country people like his brother. The love he felt for the creatures whose habitat he was protecting was founded on projection: on identification with their own wish to be left alone by noisy human beings.

Excepting some months in prison, when Brenda was alone with their little girls, Mitch lived in the lake house continuously until Gene died, six years later. He put a new roof on it and arrested its general decay, but he also felled several of the biggest and prettiest trees on the property, denuded the lakeside slope as a playground for his dogs, and hacked a snowmobile trail around to the far corner of the lake, where the bitterns had once nested. As far as Walter could determine, he never paid Gene and Dorothy a cent of rent.

Did the founder of the Traumatics even know what trauma was? This was what trauma was: going downstairs to your office early on a Sunday morning, thinking happily of your children, both of whom had made you very proud in the last two days, and finding on your desk a long manuscript, composed by your wife, that confirmed the worst fears you’d ever had about her and yourself and your best friend. The only remotely comparable experience in Walter’s life had been the first time he’d masturbated, in Room 6 of the Whispering Pines, following the friendly instructions (“Use Vaseline”) provided by his cousin Leif. He’d been fourteen, and the pleasure had so dwarfed all previous known pleasures, and the outcome had been so cataclysmic and astonishing, that he’d felt like a sci-fi hero wrenched four-dimensionally from an aged planet to a fresh one. And Patty’s manuscript was similarly compelling and transformative. His reading of it seemed, like that first masturbation, to last a single instant. He stood up once, early on, to lock his office door, and then he was reading the last page, and it was exactly 10:12 a.m., and the sun beating on his office windows was a different sun from the one he’d always known. It was a yellowy, mean star in some strange, forsaken corner of the galaxy, and his own head was no less altered by the interstellar distance he’d traversed. He carried the manuscript out of his office and past Lalitha, who was typing at her desk.

“Good morning, Walter.”

“Good morning,” he said with a shudder at her nice morning smell. He walked on through the kitchen and up the back staircase to the little room where the love of his life was still in her flannel pajamas, ensconced in a nest of bedding on her sofa, holding a mug of creamed coffee, and watching some sports-channel roundup of the NCAA basketball tournament. The smile she gave him—a smile that was like the last flash of the familiar sun he’d lost—turned to horror when she saw what he was holding.

“Oh, shit,” she said, turning off the television. “Oh, shit, Walter. Oh, oh, oh.” She shook her head vehemently. “No,” she said. “No, no, no.”

He closed the door behind him and slid down with his back against it until he was sitting on the floor. Patty drew breath, and then drew more breath, and more breath, and didn’t speak. The light in the windows was unearthly. Walter shuddered again, his molars clicking as he sought to control himself.

“I don’t know where you got that,” Patty said. “But it was not for you. I gave it to Richard last night to get him away from me. I wanted him out of our life! I was trying to get rid of him, Walter. I don’t know why he did that! It’s so horrible that he did that!”

From a distance of many parsecs, he heard her start crying.

“I never meant you to read that,” she said in a keening high voice. “I swear to God, Walter. I swear to God. I’ve spent my whole life trying not to hurt you. You’re so good to me, you don’t deserve this.”

She cried for some long while then, some ten or a hundred minutes. All regular Sunday-morning programming was suspended for the emergency, the day’s normal course so thoroughly obliterated that he couldn’t even feel nostalgia for it. As chance would have things, the spot on the floor directly in front of him had been the scene of a different kind of emergency just three nights earlier, a benign emergency, a pleasurably traumatic coupling that in hindsight now looked like a harbinger of this malignant emergency. He’d come upstairs late on Thursday evening and attacked Patty sexually. Had performed, with her surprised consent, the violent actions which, without her consent, would have been a rapist’s: had yanked off her black work pants, pushed her to the floor, and rammed his way inside her. If it had ever occurred to him to do this in the past, he wouldn’t have done it, because he couldn’t forget that she’d been raped as a girl. But the day had been so long and disorienting—his near-infidelity with Lalitha so inflaming, the roadblock in Wyoming County so infuriating, the humility in Joey’s voice on the telephone so unprecedented and gratifying—that Patty had suddenly seemed, when he walked into her room, like his object. His obstinate object, his frustrating wife. And he was sick of it, sick of all the reasoning and understanding, and so he threw her on the floor and fucked her like a brute. The look of discovery on her face then, which must have mirrored the look on his own face, made him stop almost as soon as they’d got started. Stop and pull out and straddle her chest and stick his erection, which seemed twice its usual size, into her face. To show her who he was becoming. They were both smiling like crazy. And then he was back inside her, and instead of her usual demure little sighs of encouragement she was giving forth loud screams, and this inflamed him all the more; and the next morning, when he went down to the office, he could tell from Lalitha’s chilly silence that the screaming had filled the whole large house. Something had begun on Thursday night, he hadn’t been sure what. But now her manuscript had shown him what. The end was what. She’d never really loved him. She’d wanted what his evil friend had. The whole thing now made him glad he hadn’t broken the promise he’d given Joey at dinner in Alexandria the following night, the promise that he not tell anybody, but especially not tell Patty, that he’d married Connie Monaghan. This secret, as well as several other more alarming ones that Joey had vouchsafed, had been weighing on Walter all weekend, all through the long meeting and the concert the day before. He’d been feeling bad about keeping Patty in the dark about the marriage, feeling as if he were betraying her. But now he could see that, as betrayals went, this one was laughably small. Cryably small.